A measure of democratic rights in Africa by a foundation, sponsored by Mo Ibrahim, tries to make the case that insecurity will undermine future economic growth.

The report was mentioned by the BBC

The index groups indicators in four groups. In two of them, Sustainable Economic Opportunity and Human Development, the picture was mostly positive – and in fact no country declined significantly in these categories, the index authors said.

But in the other two categories – Safety and Rule of Law, and Participation and Human Rights – the picture was grimmer.

[…]

Africa is currently growing at four times the pace of Europe, helped by booming portable telephony and raw materials industries.

But 35 states have become less secure, while two-thirds of African countries show a declining performance in terms of human rights, the index suggests.

The foundation site has an excellent interface that makes it easy to compare the data for each country.

Communication between BT and ACS:Law were uncovered during the ACS:Law breach, possibly related to Operation PIAB. The BBC reports that the insecure transmission of customer data by BT violates the Data Protection Act

BT has admitted it sent the personal details of more than 500 customers as an unsecured document to legal firm ACS:Law, following a court order.

[…]

A BT official admitted “unencrypted” personal data was sent, adding it “would not happen again”.

A research paper for USENIX, “TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones”, accuses android applications of leaking information without user approval.

Using TaintDroid to monitor the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications, we found 68 instances of potential misuse of users’ private information across 20 applications

Fifteen of the apps sent user data to advertising companies without user approval or notice, while other apps sent unique IDs and tracking/location data (even when the application did not run).

Google maps now has a fun interface to explore Antarctica from a penguin’s view (above water only).

Google must be getting more sensitive about local privacy laws. I see that some penguins have their identity protected — the images are a little fuzzy.